 This is Think Tech Hawaii, Community Matters here. Welcome to the Cyber Underground. I'm your host, Dave Stevens. With me here today is Jay Fadal. Hey Jay, how you doing? Hey Dave. Thank you so much for being my guest. Nice to meet you. Yeah. You're one of the original thought minds of the founders of Think Tech Hawaii. I'm honored to have you as my guest on here. We're going to be discussing some important issues, but the first thing we need to tell our audience is, hey, we're still here. Happy about that. Happy about that. So at 8.07 last Saturday on the 12th of this month in January, 2018, we received a ballistic missile alert. First time I've ever seen that. First time I've even heard about that. And the bad part is I woke up at 8.12. We have nice thick windows. If the sirens had been going on, I wouldn't have known. We sleep through the tsunami sirens. It's pretty scary. And here we are five minutes after the morning. So I'm thinking, okay, well we have a nuclear impact in about now. Okay, what do we do? And so we sat around for five minutes and nothing happened. Then we sat around for another 33 minutes. Then someone said, never mind. Meanwhile, you know, my wife was upset. I was a little upset. This is something we're now having to live with, right, the actual threat of a nuclear bomb. Did you believe it? I grew up in the Cold War. So we had to do the duck and cover drills. Baby boomer, you grew up with the duck and cover drills, right, okay. So I, right about the 70s, California said, oh, we're not going to do duck and cover drills. We're going to do earthquake drills. It's the exact same thing. You got under a table. It was the exact same drill. But in the Cold War they resumed the duck and cover drills, you know, in the 80s. And it really scared the crap out of people. This week we're going to have a whole show on the psychological impacts on engineering and technology because people think there's an impending doom any second. Most people I know didn't know what to do during this event. You know, what was your first thought when you saw the warning? I said, oh my goodness. And I woke my wife up. I was working. Okay. 807. I woke my wife up and I said, I think we've got to do something now. So we decided, we'd go down in the part of our home that's sort of in an earthen part of a hill. You know, there's a lot of concrete there and no windows in that room. It's kind of, you know, a storage area. And we sat there with our puppy and I called my brother in Washington and I asked him, you know, what do you think? Have you heard about this? Is this all over the news for the nation and the world? And he said no. Nothing. Then he was with the computer and he started checking, checking, checking. He couldn't find anything. That one thing he found, this is like 8N, 812 maybe. Yeah. He found there was something in a thing called express.co.uk in the UK that talked about this ballistic missile threat. It was really extraordinary because it wasn't on CNN or anything else. And I said, gee, I wonder if they learned it from us or we learned it from them. All right. Anyway, so, you know, after a while, and he said, my brother said, and he had the advantage of being distant, you know, he said, this is not true. This is fake. This doesn't make sense. It's too strange to be true. It is not true. And he was right. And I bought that. But the question, and I put it to you too, is between 807 and the time you concluded it wasn't right. Yeah. Did you have thoughts about your own mortality? I didn't. And because I grew up in Cold War and we'll discuss some of these facts, the first thought I thought about, and let's put up the first image right now. Let's put up that. Yeah. That's what I thought was coming. Basically, a big nuclear donut going to hit someplace in Hawaii. And the main target I knew was going to be either the city of Honolulu itself or the Pearl Hickam Joint Base, so Pearl Harbor and Hickam Air Force Base, the two biggest most pocketed bases here on the island of Oahu, just outside of downtown Honolulu. And they share runway space with Honolulu International Airport. So we have military bases, international airport, and a capital city of a state, all prime targets. So since I live on the other side of the island, over a 3,000 foot mountain range to Ko'olau, I did not think that I would be immediately affected by the blast. But there's many more effects from a nuclear explosion than that. So let's put up where we thought I was coming from. We have an image here. We thought I was coming in from North Korea. It's approximately 200 miles. And you can see from North Korea to Hawaii, that's a hard target to hit. Now North Korea, just so you know, North Korea has only hit basically the sea of Japan so far. That's a much bigger target. We're a tiny little speck in the middle of the ocean. To hit us would take some significantly enhanced technology. I hope they don't have that yet. So the main lens is a better target. They can make it there. But if they need a short-range missile and we're in the way and they can hit us, that's where the thing is, Pearl Harbor, Hickam. Now let's look at the blast radius. This is what would have happened in a 150 megaton blast, which is a medium-sized nuclear weapon. They go as big as 250, don't they? They go as big as 300. 300? Yeah, they have been 300. And Hiroshima was 15. Right. Hiroshima and Nagasaki, much smaller, right? They measured without the 10s, we're 10 times more here. And you can see right in the middle, you see Pearl Harbor. And that green circle is the fire that you're going to get. That outer circle is where you could still get broken windows. And the second to the outer circle is where you can still receive third degree burns if you're in an exposed area. You can see it doesn't quite reach Honolulu, but where it's impacting, as you know the way this island is built, that's all of our infrastructure right there, passing from one side of the island to the next, and that's going to cut us off. In the meantime, all that radiation goes straight up in the air, because it's a big mushroom cloud. Most of the stuff will sink right away, but winds will carry most of the other material, whatever directions the winds are blowing. Thankfully, mostly we don't have the winds that come at us, we have winds that go away from us. Sorry, Kauai. That's the way the winds head, but sometimes they blow the other way. So the main thing to know is that when you see that flash, don't look at it. However, if you do, very rare cases that flash from atomic explosions ever cause retinal burn, like permanent damage to the eye. Most people get flash blindness and will recover in several minutes to an hour or so, a day at the most. So you're not blind. However, don't look at it. If you see that flash, look away. What would be your first thought if you're standing around downtown and this flash happened, and it's just the brightest thing you've ever seen in the world? You know Dave, I've been walking around making joke about this for years, and my joke is, there's a question. If you woke up one morning and looked west in Oahu, toward Pearl Harbor and the west side of the island, and you saw a blinding flash, and the question is, would you be surprised? No. And the answer is I wouldn't be surprised. I wouldn't be surprised either. It's something that is in the cards somehow. You just think that if we're ever a target, that's going to be occurring. We've already been attacked once. We're an iconic target, and maybe that's what Kim Jong-un feels, that to do it again would be really spectacular. And there's a lot to lose out here. Sure, militarily. Yeah. Even though there are a lot of Korean people here, but he doesn't care about Korean people. He doesn't care about the South Korean people at all. He doesn't. It's hard to believe he cares about his own people. It's all about him. And this would be a significant impact, and would force retaliation. Yeah. Well, it would create... I mean, there's a whole thing, talked about this before on the show, it's The Guns of August by Barbara Tuckman, who was a history professor at Columbia for a long time, wrote some great historical books. And the book that reminds me is The Guns of August because she talked about how everybody was programmed for war in 1914. Everybody had a plan. And all it took was something to start the chain reaction of the plans all around Europe. And that's what would happen here. If there was one explosion, there'd be a really fair chance that it would start the plan. And Trump would blow somebody up in North Korea and then somebody else would attack. Before you know it, we'd have a world full of fallout. Yeah. Everyone would have to choose sides. And you're right, 1914, I think it was the assassination of the Franz Ferdinand, the chain reaction. And all of Europe and millions of lives. Right, right. So, yeah, I mean, I think that could happen again. And so the whole thing about pushing the button, or pushing the button on the computer with the warning, is so dangerous. Yeah. But, you know, you ask about the reaction and, you know, and how, you know, people would be injured or killed. I mean, what I think about, and what I think about when I ask my funny question about, would you be surprised, is step two. Step two is, you know, okay. You survive. Somehow, miraculously, you survive. You've got some medical problems and burns and radioactivity and your internal organs aren't working so well and blah, blah, blah. But you're still alive. Right. And it's day one, day two, day three. The social fabric is gone. Aloha, we can't do that anymore. It's everybody on his own looking for, you know, food, water, the basics of life, and taking those things from others by whatever means. And all of the accoutrements of, you know, a modern society, of a city, of a state, are gone. And we're living in rubble, and we're taking what we want. And the whole thing, and that is more painful to me than I can possibly explain. It's the devolution of humankind right in front of your eyes. Right. And this has happened many times in human history, right? The fall of the Roman Empire, the plagues in two different centuries in Europe, and then the Spanish flu hit us again, and then we had World War I and World War II. And devastating whole countries and leaving them, what do we lose in World War II? Sixty million people. And yeah, the recovery after each one of those is traumatic. I am inspired by how humans have come together since those events. I mean, there was a group of people somewhere that inspired other groups of people, and they all came together eventually. So I think that's how it happens. We're chaotic at first, and then we come together. That's just the history that keeps repeating itself. We need to talk about, first of all, what to do when you see the flash. So when you see the flash, odds are there's going to be 20 to 30 seconds before you're personally impacted. So there's a shockwave that's going to come your way. And it all depends on where the bomb lands. If it explodes in the air, or if it's a ground impact, those are two different impacts. You've got a little time to run for cover, and get behind something solid. Get in Chinatown Municipal Parking, one level down. Perfect place to be for a little while. Don't stay there long because we're on an island. And any impact is going to cause a disturbance in the water. It's going to push it out. And when it comes back, we get a tidal surge, a tsunami effect. And it doesn't just hit one side of the islands. As we found that every time we get a tidal surge or a tsunami, it has a wraparound effect. So the entire island will be affected. So you've got a few minutes, get away from the blast, and then get out of sight. Get up into the hills. Get in someplace. And try to stay where you are, wherever you can get to, where it's safe, where you're not going to get flooded or burned. Try to stay underground or inside for about 24 hours. So the dissipation of radiation over, it's about 14 days, you go from 100% to 1% of the radiation. And then it's a lot safer to get outside. But the first 24 hours, that's mission critical. Write a shelter in place for that amount of time. What happens when you get out? Is there going to be somebody up there to help you? Give you a helping hand? Depends on where you are. Will it be HPD? Will it be the National Guard? Will it be the Army, the Navy? Will somebody be there? Or will they be in the same spot that you are? Well, currently on this island, if we're just discussing the one blast, we still have three military bases that will be unaffected. Most of them in the center of the island up in Oahuia, they're very well equipped. So they could be put into service. We could go into martial law and they could police the entire place very quickly. And they could come in and start doing the nuclear cleanup right away. They're prepared. So that's the good news. Now if they got hit by a nuclear weapon also, that's bad news. The other side of the island, so on the other side of the Aulao Mountains, the other side of the Waianae Mountains, those people will be almost unaffected. What we do have to worry about is something called an electromagnetic pulse. All nuclear weapons, when they explode, give off this electromagnetic pulse. Now the way that works is it's a puff of air. And when this happens, it pushes up as well as out, right? And the upward motion will push the ionosphere up and out of the way so quickly it creates a charge. So that charge in the atmosphere, that EMF, that electromagnetic frequency, will get into every device we have and could fry it. So the problem with the... Even without actually damaging it. Without even being connected. Just fry it electronically. It could fry it, right? Yeah. But devices like phones, like these little phones we have here, they have very short current paths. And the longer the current the path, the more damage. So cars, you would think it would get fried right away, most of them actually would survive. Because very short pathways in the circuitry inside these devices. So there's a good chance, especially if the device is off, that it won't be affected. You won't have time to turn off your device when you see the flash, by the way. That EMP, that's right away. So turn off... Oh, that's faster than the actual... Yeah. It actually travels in the light. So it's faster than the blast that would knock you over. Right. Right. Definitely. So once that happens, it's done. But if your phone's still on after the blast, you're good to go. Yeah, well you're good to go, but you still have to have a cell tower. It has to be electricity to run that, yeah. We need to take a break and we'll come right back. And this is going fast. We're going to take a little break, pay some bills, and until then, stay safe. Aloha. I'm Kili Ikeena, and I'm here every other week on Mondays at two o'clock p.m. on Think Tech Hawaii's Hawaii Together. In Hawaii Together, we talk with some of the most fascinating people in the islands about working together. Working together for a better economy, government, and society. So I invite you into our conversation every other Monday at 2 p.m. on Think Tech Hawaii Broadcast Network. Join us for Hawaii Together. I'm Kili Ikeena. Aloha. I'm going to the game and it's going to be great early arriving for a little tailgate. I usually drink, but won't be drinking today because I'm the designated driver and that's okay. It's nice to be the guy that keeps his friends in line, keeps them from drinking too much so we can have a great time. A little responsibility can go a long way because it's all about having fun on game day. I'm the guy you want to be. I'm the guy I say good-bye. I'm the guy that says let's go. Welcome back to the Cyber Underground. I'm Dave and I'm trying to keep a smile on my face while we discuss nuclear war. It's very hard to keep a good smile going when we're talking about it. That's because you don't believe it's going to happen. In your heart of hearts, you don't really think this is going to happen. Okay. Most people feel that way. Okay. So it's kind of an exercise, isn't it? It is. So let's talk about that. Being prepared for something like this. Now you've seen the blast, you've sheltered in place. Now you've got to put your plan into effect. Did you have a plan? No. Most people don't have a plan. Most people don't even prepare for a hurricane. I bend over and kiss my colleague goodbye. That's my plan. If you're in that area, yeah, you're gone, right? If you're outside the area though, you have to have a plan. How do you communicate with relatives? What can you eat? How do you shelter? How do you feed your pets? All these things. You have to plan for this stuff and go shopping. Let's put up the ready.gov nuclear blast site. Now this is ready.gov created by the Department of Homeland Security. They actually show you what you should do in all those different disasters. And that list goes off the screen there. But they do cybersecurity, bioterrorism, everything that you want to scare the absolute crap out of you. This site has it. It's wonderful. It really is good reading. It'll keep you up at night. Now on this page, we have another one that says build a kit. And this is your emergency kit. You can go here and find out everything you need to get inside your kit and survive and what should you put in that kit. So let's put up my notes for about two seconds here. We're going to put up, this is my notes page. This is what we're going to talk about right now. I'm going to bring this up for a couple of seconds while we talk about this because I want people to be able to come right after the break in this show on YouTube and see my list and see the references I have here. Everything in red is a website that you can go to for more information again from the Department of Homeland Security. And this is good stuff. I got a lot of notes from this. Let's start talking about this after, don't look at the blast, they sheltered. Make your way home as soon as you can. Yeah, and avoid areas marked hazmat, what they call hot zones. So that's going to be the highest radiation. Don't kick up a lot of dust. So radiation falls to the earth stuck to particles like dust or anything else you can see. And the more that stuff that touches you and your skin, the higher dose of radiation you're going to get in. And you don't want that. Radiation can make you sick over time and cause health problems. Also, the moment you get a chance, change your clothes. Because if you've been in nuclear blast area, the 90% of the radiation you've got is on your clothing. Take your clothing off, dispose of it. Get rid of it. Don't bring it in your house. Change clothes. But first take a shower. Now, when you change clothes, you might not be near a shower. So it's better to just change clothes. Now when you go, finally, do take a shower, soak, water, don't scrub. Don't scrub your skin. You could damage your skin. You could actually get irradiated particles underneath the skin if you open up the skin accidentally. So just soap and water, shower, shampoo, whatever you can. And get all the radiation off and then clean clothes afterwards. Once you get home. Assuming there's water at home. There may be a big assumption there. So there's parts of the island that have to have a power generator pumping water into the house. There's a lot of places like where I live. It's gravity driven. Can we trust the water here? Actually, most of it you can. Water actually does not carry radioactivity too well. And it's a great shield for radioactivity. Most of our water comes from wells and aquifers. It means it's not an open reservoir. It's not going to have all the dust dropping on it. Catchments would. Catchments would have this. However, most of those tanks don't supply a lot of the water out here. So well water, aquifer water, that's probably going to be okay water to drink. You won't get a lot of radiation from that. It's going to be on the sides of the island that weren't affected by the initial blast. So you want to do that. Is a Geiger counterpotty to kit? I ordered one. I did. I want a Geiger counter. I want to be able to scan. Before or after Saturday? After. I did not think of this. I was like you. I thought, no, someone will take care of this. We're not going to get nuked. Come on. And then I got the alert. I went, maybe it might happen. I think inherently what you're saying, Dave, is that you have to be independent. You have to take care of things yourself. You cannot make assumptions that the White Knight is coming to rescue you. No. Because in fact, my wife called HPD right after this thing on Saturday. And she said, what do I do? What do I do? It was a reasonable question. And reasonable to assume the police know. They should. They have some answer. And they said, well, it's right there in the notice. Take shelter immediately. That's what you should do. Take shelter. They knew nothing. All they knew was that notice came out and they believed it. They had no verification, but they believed it. So my general view of this is that you're on your own. And you cannot assume this White Knight's coming. You cannot assume the police are going to help you with the Army of the Navy. You have to fend for yourself, at least for a while. And I think you're right. Emergency services, especially after this kind of a disaster, with this kind of massive death toll and injuries toll, emergency services will be restricted to only the most critical of injuries will be treated at the time. And so you're right. You're on your own for the most part. So your emergency kit should start out with something like this. We have here a radio with a hand crank on it and a USB port so I can charge my cell phone if I need to. And we were talking about cell phone. Cell phone towers are all over the island and only some of them will go out. The problem is, even if we have cell coverage, the infrastructure might be eradicated. So there's backup plans for most phone companies to how to reroute the traffic so they can use existing towers that are still in service. Most of those towers have an 8 to 12 hour backup. So cell phone service could essentially be on right after the blast. And if your phone still works, you could use it. The biggest problem we're going to experience is high traffic. So you might have to try several times to actually make a connection with your loved ones. I might add, by the way, I've seen the Verizon switch, which is at a location they do not disclose. And the switch has a backup power system involving lead acid batteries. There's a huge room of lead acid batteries that they say would kick in in the event that a regular power system went out. Well, that's good to know. I don't use Verizon, but that's still great to know. They must all have something like that. I'll find someone with a Verizon connection. So in my notes, I have emergency supplies. It's in ready.gov. Build a kit under those bullet points. Put all those things in there. You might see some odd ones in there, like coffee filters. Now, if you need fresh water and you're going out there collecting it from somewhere, coffee filters are the first thing you should use to filter the water. Filter it through a coffee filter. First, get most of the crap out of the water. And then you can take what's left over and set it aside for 12 to 24 hours. And then afterwards, and people are really interested in how to purify water. There's a couple of different ways. You can boil it. If you actually have like your emergency kit includes like a little propane stove, butane stove, boil it. That's the best way. If you don't have that, you can use regular chlorine bleach, a 6% solution that you buy off the shelf. Don't put any additives in it. Don't get the color-safe bleach or the odorized one. Just get the raider's bleach. You can put an eighth of a teaspoon of raider bleach into a gallon of water. You shake it up and you leave the cap loose and you set that aside for about 12 hours. Now, if you open the cap and it still smells like a little bit like bleach afterwards, you have pure water. If it doesn't smell like bleach, add another eighth teaspoon, repeat the process. In 12 hours, take the cap off and smell it. If it doesn't smell like bleach at that time, throw that water away. It's no good. The things you're looking for, you don't want to drink algae, you don't want to drink impurities, you don't want to drink radiation, you don't want to drink dirt, or other things that when a landfill overflows or when our sewer system overflows, we get really bad stuff. You don't want that. You want those coffee filters in there. That's the first party of process. Other people don't know you should have some really big trash bags, some industrial weight trash bags, because if you're stuck in your house for two weeks, there's a lot of waste. You've got to put it somewhere and you want some zip ties to lock that in so you don't have to deal with the odor. We're talking about solid waste, liquid waste, and there's no place to put it because you don't want to open the door right then. Your plumbing's not going to work. Your plumbing's not going to work. Your pets are going to have to go. You're going to have to go. You want some place to store that stuff until two weeks is up. We should keep extra water. We should keep a lot of extra water as much as you can get in your house. What most people do right before a tsunami or a hurricane or something like that, they'll fill up their bathtub. Bathtub can hold 100 gallons of water. A water heater. If you don't have one of those on-demand water heaters, you could have 60 to 100 gallons of water in there that you can drain off and you can use that. Plus you have bottled water. You can fill up containers. I would have a lot of stuff in the freezer. Now here's why. If you have freezer food and you have canned food and you have some dehydrated food and water, right after the disaster, your freezer's going to keep cold for 12 to 24 hours. Eat that stuff first. Then move on to the canned food. Oh, by the way, get a can opener, everybody. This is a big one. It's really a problem to open a can without a can opener. This is funny. I've actually heard people after an earthquake they went to open a can and all they had was the electric. Can they look at it? I can't open that. Oh, yeah. So you manage waste. We've got about one more minute. Do you have any more questions that maybe I can answer? Yeah. We have the National Disaster Preparedness Training Center, which trains agencies on how to rescue people and be resilient and bring us back to society again. And of course there's a lot of materials like ready.gov and all that. But the reality is that most people aren't going to do what you're suggesting. And the legislature, not necessarily going to take any action about this, although there's plenty of talk about criticizing the emergency management agency that pushed the button. The reality is that we're all kind of complacent, I think, about this. I think so. And when it happens, the number of people who actually save themselves is going to be a really small number. I think so. So at the end of the day, it's a philosophical question, a psychological question, and a question of the movement of history and humanity. And that'll be very interesting to watch if you can survive. If you can survive. Yeah, take our advice and survive. Thanks for joining us on the Cyber Underground, everybody. And next week we're going to be discussing the psychological impact and how this affects technology development in the future. Until then, stay safe.